Science

Science has long believed that people are able to discern only five flavors — bitter, salty, sour, sweet, and umami. The rest of what you perceive as flavor is really aroma. That’s why we believe so passionately in aroma training.

That has changed with the announcement that scientists have discovered a sixth distinct flavor element. According to an article in the journal Chemical Senses, tests of how sweetness is perceived have uncovered a set of taste buds sensitive to chemicals common to starchy foods. We’ll let CNN translate the highly technical language of the study into something understandable.

The study involved five separate experiments and about 100 adult participants. The participants were asked to taste different liquid solutions of simple and more complex carbohydrates under normal conditions and then while the sweet receptors on their tongues were blocked. The researchers discovered that even when the sweet taste receptors were blocked, the study participants could still detect a starchy taste.

It was previously assumed that starch was tasteless.

The addition of an entirely new flavor to our sense of taste changes the balance between taste and smell. Instead of being able to discern 200 million aromas for every taste, the ratio will be 166 million to one.

For now, we’re still sticking with aroma as the most important part of “tasting”.

Barrels full of booze are exciting places, chemically speaking. Of the structural components of wood, cellulose and hemicellulose are giant chains of repeating glucose molecules, and the heat of coopering breaks those into sugars—glucose, hexose, and pentose. But the third major component, lignin, is different. It’s a massive molecule, too, but with nonrepeating subunits. About half of them are vanillin (vanilla flavored), and the rest is barbecue-flavored guaiacyl, clove-flavored eugenol, and syringaldehyde. At high heat, the spicy aromatic aldehydes in the lignin undergo Maillard reactions and yield the same flavors as browned meat. When it’s hot outside, pores in the wood open up and the liquid moves inside, slurping up the tannins and other molecules that come from lignin decomposition. And the ethanol makes all those chemicals react with each other. The aldehydes mix with the acids and form fruity, tart esters.

All that activity is why it’s wise to add a couple of ice cubes. It kind of cools everything down.

Athletes spend time picturing what they’re going to do, whether it’s kicking a ball through uprights or flipping backwards off a balance beam. Now researchers have determined that the same techniques can be used to improve the sense of smell. The study, published in the Journal of Sensory Studies, worked like this:

“Novices, undergraduate enology students (intermediates) and wine experts were asked to repeatedly imagine the visual images or smells of odorant sources presented in picture form. Olfactory abilities, odor sensitivity and identification performance were compared before and after mental training to check the differential effects of the two types of sensory training. We demonstrated that, like repeated objective odorant stimulations, repeated imagination of odors was able to enhance olfactory performance in objective perception.”

There were exceptions, of course. The technique seemed to work best with people who had already been serious about analysis of aromatics — wine experts, mostly. The improvements in sensitivity faded over time, if the exercises didn’t continue. And, most interestingly, the effect was considerably less on subtle aromas. Leslie Willoughby, writing at Science, says:

“This may be due to differing degrees of difficulty for creating a mental image for different odors and may call for basic training in how to form a mental image of elusive scents. “

Now, we don’t mean to brag, but that’s what Aroma Academy training does. So we liked the study’s conclusion:

“The findings demonstrated that olfactory mental imagery was able to modify olfactory capabilities of wine professionals, with results comparable to those obtained using perceptual training. Consequently, olfactory mental imagery is an excellent tool for training the olfactory capacities of panelists, and may be extended to perfumers, flavorists and tasting panelists with a view to improving product quality control, without material stimulus such as chemical supports.”